


Wake

by idharao



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-03
Updated: 2012-04-03
Packaged: 2017-11-03 00:17:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/374949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idharao/pseuds/idharao
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Harry's head.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wake

He wakes up sweating and shaking, his heart pounding and his jaw clenched so tight he thinks it will never relax. He feels evil, and fear, and hate, and loathing, and rejection, raw grief and terrible anger. He feels utterly violated that these things can come into his head without his control and hurt him so much, and remind him of the resounding loneliness that wrenches his heart and that he has always, from the time he was a little boy, known and absorbed. He wants his mother so badly in these moments, feels abnormal that he doesn't have a mum to comfort him. The physical pain of the scar in his head, the searing, awful, blinding pain it shot through his brain, through his eyes and his sinuses, his throat and his chest, is more than anyone should have to bear. He wakes with tears in his eyes even when there are no awful visions.

  
Since he was small and sleeping under the stairs, in the space where he would be less intrusive, a reminder he is unwanted, there has been no one but him to deal with his problems. When he was young those problems were broader and simpler, the tears of a little boy who didn't understand the hostile world around him. When he came home to the wizarding world, he felt as strange and as unwanted as he ever did in the Muggle world. The balm of acceptance took a long time to even start to work for him.

  
He has always wanted to weep and feel his mother's arms around him. He has no memory of her, none of his father, no knowledge of his roots and where he came from except what others tell him. An intangible substitute. He wonders if he might have been normal if his parents were living. He wonders if he might understand what security means if his parents had lived.

  
Even Molly Weasley, who has done much for this weeping son of her heart, is not his mother. He is sick to death of screaming, hurting, dying, defending. It makes him feel worse than nothing to see people willing to die for him when he's no one and nothing. He had this forced on him and it makes him despair. And even though no one blames him, he blames himself more fiercely than any anger from outside sources could ever do. He is sick to death of being brave and sick of the bone-cracking fear he lives in all the time.

  
Some things can be related to; Neville is an orphan like him, and has spent many long hours in their mutual painful conversation of what that means. Loneliness is understood by anyone with compassion and can be eased if not cured. Ron and Hermione know something of facing death with him, and are aware that they have become targets just as much as he has.

  
What an outpouring of love it is, then, by these people who protect him at all costs. This kind of expression of unity and love he has never known, because Petunia and Vernon Dursley did not themselves know it; they operated in fear. Christmas and birthday presents became part of his life only when he became a wizard. The fullness of a family supper became his, in a way, when he came to the Burrow and sat among the red-headed Weasleys with his brothers-in-law and his wife, though he had no way of knowing it at the time. They have become his family. He feels less alone, but he also has no way of coping with his feelings at such unselfish sacrifice. He has no idea how to accept this love except to add it to the fuel of his fire to stay alive. He knows all the facts about why he is alive and why it is important to keep him so; he remembers, however, lacking the desire to keep himself alive more than once. The stories were too awful, too painful, and too chaotic. But if everyone around him is to be believed, and if all the extraordinary things that have happened to him so far are real, he has every reason to keep living. So he does. Sitting on death row at all points of your life is exhausting.

  
The real test is one of endurance. More than once Harry wonders if Voldemort can simply wait him out. He's only a kid. He worries that he will understand too well the wellspring of rage that this murderously damaged wizard feels, worries that he'll never be given the chance to feel something besides loneliness. He is afraid to die. He is afraid to suffer.

  
Because he is young he lacks the ability to zoom his mind out and embrace the bigger picture; they are fighting to protect him, yes, but they are fighting to protect their world, too. It's by coincidence that he is involved, but the war they wage at the ends of their wands is for freedom and peace as much as it is for him. That cause he can understand, but the mind of a teenager is hard-pressed to separate itself from the events around it, because they can only define the world in terms of their relationship to it.

  
Later he will learn perspective. He will suffer, he will die, but he will not be buried. All these things are ahead for the shivering boy in the darkness. He swallows, rubs his scar in hopes of stopping the endless prickling and pinching, and breathes. Still breathing, he thinks.

  
He sleeps again.


End file.
